Heavy on the brain-fog this month; I’ve been having a lot of migraines, which may not be unrelated. My fibro is not happy with the cold, but there’s nothing much to do but wait it out. However, Storygraph brought me great solace this month; when I was brain-foggy and ow, I spent hours choosing books/making recs for the Storygraph challenges I’m a part of! It’s very soothing.

ARCs Received

My gods, January is going HARD with the arcs! Is fourteen in one month a record? So many exciting books!!!

Phoning Faust – a loose retelling of Faust, but make it queer and Indonesian and modern. HERE FOR IT!

The Seaglass Blade – queerness and magical beasties from the author of the Crane Moon cycle!

Language of Liars – an Unmissable! Alien linguistics and body-swapping as a means of spying? YES I’M IN

Field Guide for the Formerly Villainous – a nonbinary ex-henchperson swears off magic after the mind-controlling villain is defeated, and buys a farm. This sounds sweet and adorable and I’m so happy about the nonbinary rep!

They Made Us Blood and Fury – Ghanian-inspired high fantasy from a Ghanian author, with matriarchies and queens producing magical ‘lifeblood’ facing a succession crisis? GIMME

Last Contract of Isako – another Unmissable! Space samurais. That’s it, I’m sold.

Muneca – Unmissable #3! A working-class witch plots to rescue her employer’s daughter from a curse, and sapphic shenanigans ensue. (Just finished this yesterday and it FREAKING ROCKS)

Princeweaver – Welsh folklore plus the queer yearning of Taste of Iron and Gold, allegedly. I am very willing to be enchanted!

A Dance of Burning Blades – a fourth Unmissable! I adored book one in this science-fantasy epic and I am RABID to get to this one!

Ruiner – a fifth Unmissable! Storytelling as combat-magic, OBVIOUSLY I pounced!

On Sundays She Picked Flowers – this wasn’t initially an Unmissable, but a third of the way through I went and added it to the list, because it’s that freaking gorgeous. Queer Black horror with decadent prose and so much cleverness going on with the approach to the horror-y things! (And has been extensively rewritten from the self-pubbed edition!)

Opal and Oestre – a trans technowitch in the future meets a goddess and goes on a quest to synthesize hormones. I stumbled across this on Bluesky and the author was lovely enough to offer me an early e-copy!

All Hail Chaos – a seventh Unmissable?! The sequel to Long Live Evil, and hi, I’M SCREAMING

Wife Shaped Bodies – AN EIGHTH UNMISSABLE! I was actually turned down for this one when I requested it on Netgalley, but then a publicist reached out to offer me an arc. All right then! A small-scale dystopia where women grow mushrooms from their bodies, and make it queer and mindfuckery-y.

Read

17 books read in January – two more than December, and a LOT more than I was expecting with all the brain-fog. And my GODS were there some incredibly incredible reads this month! The Swan’s Daughter, Red Scholar’s Wake, On Sundays She Picked Flowers, and Children of Time blew me the FUCK away – I’m still reeling. (To Ride a Rising Storm was also excellent, but I first read it in December, so it wasn’t the same shock of awesomeness as the others I hadn’t read before!) I finished Children of Time just a few hours before midnight, and anyone who’s read it knows FULL WELL while I wasn’t able to stop in the middle of that climax!

Besides being UNSPEAKABLY AWESOME, I’m really pleased I got Children of Time read in January because it’s one of my 26 Books For 2026, and it would have been a bit disappointing to not get through ANY of those books in the first month of the year!

The first three Wisconsin Gothic books (I thought they were a trilogy but nope, they are not!) were super readable, and I really loved Muñeca as well (I’m so impressed by how much the Gomez managed in the pagecount!) RE rereads, Domesticated Magic was one I fell into during the worst of the brain-fog, and made me just as happy as my first time reading it did!

Now for stats:

• BIPOC Authors: 5
• 2026 Releases: 5
• Indie: 8
• Rereads: 3
• Books From Authors New-to-Me-This-Year: 7
• 26 Books For 2026: 1
• Books Going on My Best-of-Year Lists: To Ride a Rising Storm, The Swan’s Daughter, The Red Scholar’s Wake, On Sundays She Picked Flowers, Children of Time

Not bad! And FOUR books for my best-of-year lists already?! (ListS because best-released-this-year, and best-backlist-reads, I do both.) That seems huge to me! WOO!

DNF-ed

A lot of books with clunky/weird prose this month. I was really looking forward to some of these – Song of Spores, The Mountain God Sleeps On Its Back, Last Soldier of Nava, Year of the Mer, Killing Spell – but I remain picky af, I guess. I’M GLAD I FINISHED MORE BOOKS THAN I DNFED. EVEN IF ONLY BY ONE. Nope! One more snuck in after I posted this. SIGH. And then I read one more book before midnight, so HAH, I did manage +1 more than I DNFed after all!

Reviewed

I’m actually pleasantly surprised I got two proper reviews written, considering how brain-foggy I’ve been. I really, really wish I’d been able to write more, but what can you do?

Next Up

I don’t want to dive into A Fire Born of Exile until I manage a review of Red Scholar’s Wake… So I’d better get that review done asap! And then I can tear through the rest of Bodard’s Xuya Universe stories, hopefully! But there’s also Air Logic – the final Elemental Logic book, and friends I DO NOT WANT THIS SERIES TO BE OVER, THE THOUGHT BRINGS ME PAIN! It is a problem.

There were a bunch of January releases I want to get to, like A Wild Radiance – industrial fantasy YA with rebellion and polyamory – I Will Kill Your Imaginary Friend For $200, which, I think the title says all your need to know – and Funeral Song, which I declared an Unmissable and would like to, you know, be able to confirm that! And since I just read Children of Time, OBVIOUSLY I must immediately dive into the next book in that series, Children of Ruin! OBVIOUSLY!

ARCs Outstanding

Didn’t put a huge dent in my arcs this month, and most of the dents were DNFs, sigh. Let’s hope for better progress next month!

Unmissable SFF Updates

Several new books were announced that went straight onto the Unmissable list, including new books from CL Clark, Freya Marske, and Becky Chambers! And I added On Sundays She Picked Flowers after reading it (well, a third of the way through reading it), because it is Unbelievably Exquisite. With a few cover reveals sprinkled on top, this brings the list to 73 books!

How did my predictions/anticipated reads for January go? I declared seven books Unmissable for this month, and–

• four were five-star reads (The Wolf and His King, To Ride a Rising Storm, Artifact Space, and On Sundays She Picked Flowers)(To be clear, I didn’t read TWaHK or Artifact Space this month; I read them when they were published previously)
• one was a three-star read (Through Gates of Garnet and Gold)
• one I haven’t finished yet, but am enjoying immensely (Sister Wake)
• one I haven’t started yet (Funeral Song)

I only added On Sundays She Picked Flowers to the Unmissable list after I read it, and I really hope I can write it a review that does it justice! Between that, and the fact that I already knew how great The Wolf and His King, To Ride a Rising Storm, and Artifact Space all were because I read them before this year (I did read To Ride a Rising Storm this month, but that was actually my second time reading my arc) I’m not sure I can claim credit for being great with my predictions this month. It’s not a prediction if you’ve already read the book!

Misc

At the start of the month I did my End of Year tag for 2025, looking at all my reading. I tracked some metrics I haven’t before, which meant even more pie charts than usual!

And I did two Top Ten Tuesdays this month – ten books I’m looking forward to that didn’t make my Unmissable list, and ten bookish discoveries I made last year!

Looking Forward

The Iron Garden Sutra is very high on my grabby-hands list; I’ve had a digital arc but couldn’t read it for formatting reasons – death-monks in space! Saltswept has garnered very mixed reviews, but I still really want to read this Southeast-Asian inspired fantasy voyage into a giant whirlpool (with bonus ottercat!) Vadriel Vail is, le gasp, not SFF, unless you count Gothic as SFF; it’s the sequel to the first-ever gay Gothic novel and this will be the first time it’s available since 2001! AG Slatter has a new book set in her Sourdough universe, whereas Glowing Hours is a debut that tosses an unfortunate Indian woman into the middle of the Shelleys, of Frankenstein fame, with ghosts. Heather Fawcett’s new standalone features a cat shelter that’s used as a front for wizardly dealings, but I have been assured that the cats are NOT background, which pleases me! Tradwife is horror about some influencer tradwife person letting a demon knock her up for likes, or something along those lines? I’m also hoping that the trad release of The Faithful Dark has been polished from the self-pubbed version I read, though I think the author’s stated that if you’ve read the earlier version, you don’t need to read this one. And last but CERTAINLY not least, The Cloak and Its Wizard is a delightful-sounding romp about a sentient wizard’s cloak getting into shenanigans! How fun does that sound?!

Wishing us all a fireworksical February!